Sunday, January 1, 2017

As in, I really like to read and I really read a lot. Last year, according to my tally, I read a surprising 132 books. That's up from 123 in 2015 and the highest number I have read in a given year, at least as an adult. And that doesn't even count the thousands of articles, comic books, comic strips, short stories and related ephemera that I consumed over the year.

How the hell do I read so much? Easy -- I have a tendency to pick very short books, like graphic novels, which comprised the bulk of my reading once again this year. I would love to take more deep dives into novels or whatever, but I don't always have time for that. That means that I have (no exaggeration) hundreds and hundreds of novels on my bookshelves and in my Kindle waiting to be read.

I'll get to them all one of these days.

(Cue me in another decade or two, looking like Burgess Meredith in "The Twilight Zone"...)

Anyway, here a a few recommendations (and one non-recommendation) from this year's list.

Best nonfiction book: THE MADHOUSE EFFECT by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles. An essential examination of the science of climate change and the industry devoted to denying it.

Best graphic novel: MURDER BY REMOTE CONTROL by Janwillem van de Wetering & Paul Kirchner. Boy, that's a truly weird book, luckily rescued from obscurity and brought back into print this year.

Best art book: EYE TO EYE, collection of photographs by the mysterious Vivian Maier (subject of the great documentary, "Finding Vivian Maier"). I think this is already out of print due to fights over Maier's copyrights and estate, but it's worth trying to track down a copy.Worst book of the year: Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran. I'll admit that I love Stan Lee, but this was biography by way of publicist. Sublimely awful.

It's January 1 as I post this blog, so if you'll excuse me, I think I'll stop writing and start making some headway on this year's list of books.

Okay, as 2016 turns into 2017 I find myself struck with two
powerful revelations.

A) I am really, really bad at updating this blog.

and

B) I am really, really happy about the writing that I did during
this past year.

I wrote and published 236 articles in 2016 -- that's down
from 248 in 2015 -- covering as endangered species, climate change, new
technologies, science careers, comic books and other topics. Most of those
articles were written for Scientific American, TakePart and various IEEE
publications, which kept me pretty busy, but I also wrote for PBS's Nature, Audubon, Sierra,
Hakai, Slate, Vice/Motherboard and several trade publications. I'm happy to say that I
didn't take a single assignment just for the money. I enjoyed working on
everything and feel that the work I did this past year not only mattered but
helped to add to the conversation on many important topics.

As I usually do at this point, here's a list of 20 of my
favorite articles from the past year, in the order that they were published:

(That's a pretty good list, but there were a lot of other gems in the mix. You can find links to everything that I published last year here.)

In addition to all of the above I also appeared on several radio shows and podcasts, had my work translated into Spanish, did some blogging here and there, tweeted a lot, and wrote dozens of ideas for gag cartoons that I will get around to drawing one of these days.

One more note about this year's articles: you may recall my discussion earlier this year about trying to achieve gender parity in my sources. Here's how it all broke down. I interviewed a total of 331 in 2016. 197 of them were men (59.5%), 134 were women
(40.5%). That's not quite the 50-50 I had hoped for, but it's still pretty good (and much better than most journalists, especially in the sciences).

Well, that's the year that was. 2017 is bound to hold all kinds of exciting challenges and opportunities, so I (for one) look forward to what comes out of my keyboard in the months ahead.

For now, though, thank you for reading. As always, I couldn't do any of this without my friends and readers who make all of this possible.